A Mountain of Crumbs: A Memoir (36 page)

Robert holds my hand, then puts his arm around my shoulders. I find my ear pressed to the wool of his sweater, which has a foreign, antiseptic smell. I don’t know what I want him to do—to hold me closer or to let me go. If he holds me closer, I’ll have a chance of getting on an international flight out of here, as Nina thinks I should. If he lets me go, I’ll be back to my mother’s apartment, to our life of pretense and
vranyo
. I’ll be back in my courtyard, which is a much better emblem for our life here than a ubiquitous hammer and sickle: the crumbling façade with locked doors and stinking garbage bins behind it.

Robert tightens his embrace, touching his lips to my temple, and we stand there, like so many other couples around us, gawking at the open bridge with its arms stretched to the sky.

I
TIPTOE INTO THE
hallway of my apartment around four in the morning, when the sun has crept past the cupboard and is glinting on the kitchen stove. In her ghostly nightgown, my mother is shuffling toward the bathroom, her hair, mussed by sleep, slithering down her back in a skinny braid. Robert and I said good-bye in Decembrists’ Square, halfway between his dorm and my house. He was going to see me home, but I wanted to be sure he could find his way back.

“What are you doing up so late?” My mother squints in my direction. It takes her a minute to see that I am dressed in street clothes. “Where have you been?” The light beams in her eyes as she lumbers closer. “It’s the middle of the night,” she says, shielding her face from the sun.

I haven’t told my mother anything about Robert, just as I haven’t told her anything else about my life that is of any importance. I don’t want to face her lecturing, or her guilt-provoking tirades, or her advice. What could she possibly advise me regarding a fledgling love affair with an American, my mother who was born along with the Soviet state? What advice could she give me about anything? In our brief interactions I inform her about my university classes and private lessons—always the summary of the outcomes, never the curves of the process. I recite the courses I’ve taken, the new students acquired. She seems to think she is in control of my life.

“It’s white nights,” I say and look out the window at the tide of the gleaming roofs that roll toward the horizon. “The whole city is awake. Everyone’s out on the streets, everyone’s in love.”

“I don’t care about everyone,” says my mother. “I worry about you. You’re my daughter, and at four in the morning you should be safe at home. Where were you?”

A wave of fatigue rolls over me, a lull of exhaustion. I have been so diligent in slicing my soul in two and keeping the real half to myself, away from the outside, away from my mother, who wants me to be safe.

“Out on a date,” I say, scraping with my fingernail at something stuck to the oilcloth. “With a foreigner, an American. The one who came to see our apartment.”

I see my mother gasp as her face begins to twitch with restrained tears.

“An American?” she squeezes out as if the words themselves would blemish her. “American” and “date” in the same phrase, as I should’ve known, have fused into a powerful compound fraught with explosive consequences. She glowers at me, swallowing the oncoming tears. “Aren’t there any Russian fellows around? Nice university graduates?”

She waits for my response, for some indication that I am open to normalcy. Out of the corner of my eye I see her swallow hard as I deliberately continue to trace the oilcloth flowers with my fingernail.

“What’s wrong with you?” she yells. “You’re exactly like your father—stubborn as a goat.”

Strangely, I feel removed from this whole scene, watching the action from the wings, like a director during a performance. My mother, the tragic heroine of the second act, admonishing a prodigal daughter. Robert’s taste is still lingering in my mouth; American kissing and groping are no different from what they are here. Although my mother’s voice is trembling, suspended on the brink of crying, I can’t help thinking of a joke Nina has told me:
A mother barges in on a daughter in bed with a man and laments, Next she’ll start smoking.

On my way to the kitchen door, sharpening my voice like a knife, I turn to my mother, hunched over the table.

“And, by the way, I also smoke,” I say and shut the door behind me.

What comes out of my mouth is driven by anger: at my righteous mother, who refuses to look out the window and see there is no bright dawn on the horizon; at my black-hearted country that inspired her, forged her into steel, and deceived her.

18. Waiting

D
EAR
L
ENA
,
WRITES
R
OBERT
from Copenhagen, where he had to change planes on the way back to the United States.
I’m in the airport, waiting for my flight, thinking about you. There are no border patrolmen with gold epaulets and no guns, but every store sells salted herring, just like in Leningrad. Will write again from the States.

I receive this postcard a month later, when Robert is back in New Jersey, or Texas, having long forgotten about Danish herring, but not about Leningrad. Soon after the postcard, a long envelope arrives with my name written in a careful foreign handwriting, and then a letter appears in my mailbox every week.
I miss you,
he writes, in English and Russian. He wants me to respond in Russian, so he can practice his grammar.
I’ve already begun inquiries into coming back in December,
he writes.
Getting a visa is a tortuous process and needs to be started early. It’s difficult to get to talk to someone in the Soviet Embassy in Washington—they don’t answer the phones.

Nina just laughs when I tell her about the Embassy phones. In August, we were given temporary full-time teaching jobs in the Philology department we’d just graduated from. Natalia Borisovna pats us on the shoulders and says that our summer work at the American program has strengthened our prospects. After a few years of temporary teaching, if we take an active role in Komsomol and union activities and if some faculty member drops dead or decides to retire, we may be considered for a permanent university teaching job. It’s a remote possibility, whispers Natalia Borisovna, I won’t deny it, but if such an opening happens to come up, I won’t recommend anyone but you. We are very grateful, says Nina, who knows what to say in every social situation. It will be a great privilege and honor to work in this department by your side, she adds.

I am not sure Natalia Borisovna would be so helpful if she knew that a student I met at the American program, where I worked on her recommendation, has been calling the Soviet Embassy in Washington to get a visa to see me again in December. I’m not sure she would be helpful at all if she knew that he sends me a letter every week with reports about his life and graduate studies at the University of Texas. The stories about his teaching assistantship and his Indian roommate are as incomprehensible to me as if they were written in Farsi, the language he tried to learn when he went to Afghanistan as part of the Peace Corps five years earlier. I don’t know what the Peace Corps is, but I suspect it may actually have something to do with world peace, unlike our own House of Friendship and Peace, where I worked as a secretary to the departed director.

If you want to see the U.S.,
Robert writes in one of his weekly letters,
maybe I can help you
.
Maybe you can come as my friend, on a visitor’s visa.

I read this sitting at the desk in my mother’s room and snicker. I know I’m supposed to feel appreciative, and I do, but I also feel frustrated. Who in his right mind would allow me or anyone else within the borders of the Soviet Union to go visit a friend in a capitalist country? Who would allow me to see that there are lifestyles more illuminated than our own bright future? The few exchange delegations that are permitted abroad, as I learned working in the House of Friendship and Peace, are carefully selected from the internal ranks and assiduously screened to make sure they are free of such compromising traits as foreign friends or Jewish relatives. A foreign friend is a liability we try to conceal, a handicap that instantly makes us untrustworthy and suspicious.

I think of how liberating it must feel to be able to visit friends who have never heard of Komsomol meetings that vote on the fate of a prospective tourist, or character reports required for foreign trips, or our infamous OVIR, the visa department. The visas that OVIR allegedly issues from time to time—not to most applicants and not cheerfully—are visas to leave the country, a notion that made Robert squint in confusion when I tried to explain to him what our country thinks about foreign travel. “You need a visa to leave?” he asked and scratched his forehead, although I expected him to know more about our bureaucracy. “In the rest of the world you need a visa to enter a foreign country.”

“We’re different from the rest of the world,” I said, thinking that Natalia Borisovna would be proud of this statement, thinking that in some perverted way, I was proud of it, too. “There’s something else we need to do when we leave the country,” I said, adding more weight to my twisted pride. “We have to go through customs. It’s not only what you bring in that must be ransacked by law, but also what you take out.”

“What is there to take out?” asked Robert, looking around.

Unable to control the impulse to laugh off such an outrageously misguided statement, I fumbled for an example of an exported commodity. “Rubles, for instance,” I said, but Robert scrunched his nose as if inhaling a smell from the garbage bins in my courtyard, letting me know that rubles are worthless beyond our borders. “Lacquered Palekh boxes,” I said, thinking of the exclusive shelves of the Beriozka shop I was allowed to glimpse in the ninth grade, with all its glamour of salami and Pasternak poetry—as Robert pleated his lips into a smirk. “Icons, for instance,” I said, reaching for the indisputable, thinking of Marina’s first film role in Rimsky-Korsakov’s
Tsarist Bride,
shot in a tiny village in Central Russia, whose church had been promptly relieved of its religious artifacts by the insightful movie crew.

“Icons?” said Robert and rolled his eyes. “Where could a tourist get an icon anyway?”

He was right. Not in a tiny village tucked under birches and fir trees in the European part of the country where there might still be a babushka or two who, in their pre-revolutionary ignorance, keep clutching at the idea of the divine. No foreigner would be allowed to go to such a village, of course, even if he was willing to pay for the ticket in the hard, dependable currency of a capitalist country.

So it was at this point that I realized the futility of my argument, the futility of every argument, present or future, Robert and I might have. The problem we face is that under his un-Russian curly hair presides an American brain, which is fundamentally different from my Russian brain. If I had to place us on the Darwinian origin of species tree, Robert would sit on the end of the top branch, while I would dangle off a side, dead-end stump. The fact that we can speak each other’s language is as irrelevant to our mutual understanding as my mother’s loaded silences and pointed looks.

On the desk where I’m sitting there is a picture of my mother in my grandparents’ garden in Stankovo, standing by an apple tree holding up a branch that sinks under the weight of apples. Next to her stands my smiling grandma, her face creased with wrinkles. The photograph was taken six years ago, just before she died “from her heart.” That’s what my anatomy professor mother said with uncharacteristic imprecision: she died from her heart, like most Russians. It was an expected death, at an age when most of our compatriots already lie in cemeteries, just a year before Dedushka, my grandfather, died from his heart, too.

I don’t know why I keep looking at my grandma’s photograph, at her smiling eyes behind round glasses, at the black and white apples on sagging tree branches, the garden I’ve always resented as much as my own dacha. I can almost feel the worn-out-cotton softness of the dress she’s wearing in the picture, the dress I suddenly remember so well that its dry, woody smell of her oak armoire rises to my nostrils.
Mamochka,
as my mother used to call her, the diminutive of
mama—
a plain, non-endearing form I use to address my own mother. What would Grandma, with her arms as soft as her dress, think of moving to America? What would she think of me? “Whatever happens, happens for the best,” she always said in her calm, liquid voice when things happened that no one liked.

T
HEN MAYBE
I
CAN
invite you as my fiancée,
writes Robert.
I’ve inquired at the State Department, where they told me there is such a program. You can come here and stay for up to a year to see if you like it.

I reread the word fiancée, which sounds frightening and thrilling. It sounds as if it has floated from a more old-fashioned life, from the world of Pushkin and Tolstoy, when women, before they married, became engaged after they danced with some officer at their first ball and then faithfully waited for him to return from a battle with the French army or an exile to the Caucasus.

I reread the words “if you like it.” I know I’ll only be a make-believe fiancée, but as such, could I really see with my own eyes what we’ve only been allowed to glimpse in books? Could I really step through the looking glass and wonder if I like it there? I know that in our locked-up universe an exit visa for a fiancée is as far-fetched as that for a friend, yet I sit at my mother’s desk and think of America. It is clearly a waste of time: the images are foggy and monochromatic; they shift with every breath I take because, like our bright future, they are based on nothing. I try to imagine where Robert lives, but all that drifts into my head are Leningrad courtyards and flaking façades with yellow windows peeking through the dusk. I try to imagine an American airport, but all I can see is the one-story shack of Pulkovo, with two rusty toilets and a dozen planes scattered on cracked asphalt taken over by weeds.